Customer Reviews

A Nearly Normal Life: A Memoir

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Until his 14th summer, Charles Mee's world seemed safe and unshakable --- secure in a small Midwestern town, surrounded by a loving family, winning praise for his athletic prowess and on the verge of getting his first kiss. And then, suddenly, everything changed. Mee's exposure to the polio virus didn't just infect him --- it profoundly altered his reality, forever changing his perceptions of himself, his family and the way the world works. In this beautiful, heartbreaking tale, Mee poignantly recounts the story of the sick, lonely, frightened child he was and his transformation to the man he is today --- brilliant, creative, funny and "nearly normal."

I don't write many reviews anymore, who has time? However, this book stood out so much above the rest I've read lately that I just had to share. The book is about a polio survivor, the 50's, the discovery of the vaccine and oh so much more. It's about living the life you were handed, not the want you thought you were going to get.

His epilogue is pure poetry. An example: "Life continues to change. New things surface; old wounds hidden by bigger wounds show up when the bigger wounds are healed; new clusters of misgivings and confusion take shape to replace old clusters of exhausted adjustments. New things come along to be accepted with grace and peace. The disability and its challenges continue to evolve, and one must achieve acceptance and grace and peace again and again, day after day."

I highly recommend this book to everyone. I read about 5 books a week and this book is in my top 20 of all time.

In the early fifties, polio was every parent's nightmare. Each summer it struck ruthlessly, killing and maiming children without warning. The virus "stripped away from the nerves their myelin sheath, which acts like insulation around an electric cord, so that the nerves short-circuited, sizzled, and died. they stopped sending signals to the muscles, and so the muscles stopped working. Arms and legs lay limp and useless." It was a vastly misunderstood disease which prompted treatments often painful and sometimes bizarre. Patients were covered in hot, wet blankets, stimulated by electric shock, immersed in boiling hot tubs, subjected to experimental surgeries, and imprisoned in iron lung machines. Hospitals sometimes had 60 children in iron lungs at one time jammed into one ward room. Charles Mee's account of the disease which irrevocably altered his life is both intriguing and horrifying, but always inspiring. An athlete as a teenager, he was forced to redefine himself. He emerged from a near-death experience to discover an intellectuality in himself which might never have been realized. The book is a personal story which attests to the indomitable human spirit, but it is also an absorbing account of a gruesome chapter in medical history.

In 1953, when he was a robust 14-year-old, Charles L. Mee was stricken with viral polio. This memoir describes his struggle with polio, and also comments on the treatments (sometimes horrific) that were tried to beat this virus that, in 1953 alone, struck over 50,000 people. His struggle was not an easy one, and his later life wasn't either, but he comes to terms with his limitations, becoming a successful historian and playright. It's a real eye-opener, and he doesn't mince words, which makes for a compelling read.

No matter how great a person's chances are of getting ill or injured, everybody always thinks "it's never going to happen to me." Charles L. Mee was no different than everybody else in the 1950s who thought that they would not get polio; he thought that it would be somebody else who would catch the disease. In his touching and witty memoir, A Nearly Normal Life, Mee tells of his arduous struggle to overcome his devastating case of polio during his teenage years; Mee was one of the millions who were afflicted with spinal polio during the epidemic of the 1950s. The author vividly recounts his battle against paralysis and death, as well as his endeavor to recover and return to the normalcy that the 1950s culture emphasized. Not only does the memoir give the reader a lucid and detailed picture of the Eisenhower years, but it is also a reflective essay about America in the 1950s, polio,and the American culture that relentlessly advocated the idea of being "normal." For those of us who did not live through the fifties, A Nearly Normal Life provides a good description of what life was like for the average middle-class American family.

I've just finished Charles Mee's memoir. I bought it ten years ago to research something I was writing, but never used it for that reason. This week I picked it up and could not put it down.

Mee creates, or re-creates, the world of America The Normative, our mid-20th-century America, full of paternal wise men and nurturing women and children who would do better than their parents. The spectre of polio over all this - I remember it well. My mother was terrified of it. We were Polio Pioneers (and I learned, in the book, just how pioneering we were! She had utter trust in the medical profession to bring us to get that vaccine the minute it was available.)

Mee's description of what a great, crashing blow it was to him, at fourteen, to be utterly incapacitated for weeks, an object of fear and pity, is terrifyingly evocative to me - this is the feared fate I and everyone I knew escaped because of that vaccine. The blow seems to have opened his mind and soul in a way that, from my vantage point, reading in 2010, seems mystical and fated. His reach into his fourteen-year-old mind might be bringing so much of the adult man that he seems, at fourteen, to be wise beyond his years. But I think in the solitude of his incapacity he was in touch with something eternal. At any rate, the boy he presents us with speaks well of the sheltered upbringing he'd had - one that had not given him previous reason to be fearful of life.

The detailed way he noticed his environment on his first visit home from the hospital - his fingerprints on a leather couch, tracking the course of a breeze around the corner of his porch - suggest an almost pschedelic state of consciousness, and I wonder if adolescent growth (sped-up) coupled with the intense mental activity of his immobility did not create a permanently altered state.

At any rate, Mee's gifts are lavish. I loved his voice. I loved his honesty and his attempt to re-create the past around and within him. Thank you, Charles Mee.

From long experience with this area, Mee's accounts both of the era of his youth and the experiences of polio ring very true from the pen of an accomplished writer. One senses that Mee never really made peace with his disability and its impact, inasmuch as he was able to evade, compensate, head into intellectual endeavors, etc., so there are many polio/disability issues not well dealt with here. (Significantly it ends with his finding an oasis in the intellectual world of the Ivy League and the intellect.) However, one has to suspect that the decision to tell the story, with insight and honesty, may represent at long last a step in addressing what he may have hoped at one time to simply "leave behind." Perhaps there will be a sequel in which his historical training and writing skills are again focused on the complex interrelationships between disability, psyche and society. This is a good read, though, even if it is not the full story.

I think if the author hadn't written his memoir in such a vain way--it would have been better??